The coded phrase meant a lot of things. When I got no answer I poked it out again, this time in plain English: WHO’S SENDING? WHAT TERMINAL? A half minute passed before I was emotionally ready to accept the fact of no answer. Therefore no completed repair job, therefore no weekend. I got back into my coveralls.
While I was changing, the readout began clacking again. Hopping with one leg in my coveralls, I hoped for some acknowledgment but instead the readout read:
Otherwise must be cluttered.
This, of course, assumes thoughts
and if some interest less . . .
Ex pulpit on the end of ducking
stool, plastic bucket in which
mysterious things to networks
used in the Greek, into a play
so rescue, silently thinking—
Shaping their own
coated votaries, reels o
spastic forations, IBM cards
forever circling ex machina.
Full circle, no end, non incipit.
Now this was such utter drivel as to abolish my incipient respect for the anonymous poet. I pulled up a chair and typed: QUIT CLUTTERING UP THE CORE WITH THIS CRAP. WHO TOLD YOU YOU WERE A POET ANYWAY?
A moment later I got:
Contemplative computer,
adequate machine.
Their breeds of dei emerged
A boom, bearing faint tones of
the careless lineman . . .
Sometimes destroy our power.
An apparatus, the author
muddled that only god, its electronic
history replete with golden . . . Surely
worshiping something? Spinning tape
or holy mysteries, helium cooled
deus. Somehow it’s only
trouble; no middle.
In retrospect I must admit it’s not a bad example of its genre. Not being a poet makes it easy to make value judgments like that. But at the time I was annoyed, knowing what had seemed an easy job was now probably going to screw up my whole weekend. Halfway through author muddled I started sweeping the inputs, trying to find out which terminal was sending this garbage. A computer complex of this size has more built-in checks and balances than the whole Supreme Court and legislative branch put together. But nothing was working right. I could detect no input from any terminal.
Finally, and in full knowledge that tomorrow the center would start receiving bills for so many minutes of lost time at so many thousand dollars per minute multiplied by a hundred-odd subscribers, I pulled the panic switch and cut off all input.
For a moment nothing happened. I wondered what to do next. Actually, I was getting a little out of my department. You see, I’m supposed to know all those languages, Algol, Cobol, and a bunch of others but in my end of the business we don’t have much occasion to—oh hell! I don’t know what was wrong with the goddam computer; I still don’t know. Acting from pure inspiration I typed out: ANY MORE POETRY? Immediately I got this:
Who was influential, compiled the lifetime’s
wisdom. Appointing not to independent
beatitudes, last word in ethics;
called it love.
So simple when Faust discovered about
holding one’s uninterrupted words, some
daimons remember nothing. And now,
were it not for songwriting.
Perhaps the old confessed, perhaps.
But always having this, yet what is even
nothing? Perhaps person whose half
hour, whose presence overall. Also
sprach machina.
There’s something about this kind of stuff that gets to you after a while. No doubt there are profound psychological terms like deja vu to explain it but the nearest I could come was like trying to tell some half-remembered story and forgetting the punch line. Whatever it was, it had no business in the memory core. I say this informally because a client can stuff all the garbage he wants in there so long as he pays his monthly bill.
But if a client were putting it in, it would be coded so only he could get it out.
Yet, here the core was baring its soul with all the abandon of a teenager on speed. I had a sudden thought and rechecked all the power supply voltages. Everything was O.K. I sat down again at the input and typed: GIVE SOURCES OF LAST READOUT. It probably would get me nothing. I had no idea whether this core was programmed to read plain English or if I had to convert it into a half million of the yes-no’s of Boolean algebra. But if I could locate this garbage and give the memory core an electronic enema maybe my weekend could still be salvaged.
Somewhere between the cerebellum and the short hairs on the back of my neck were stirring some unpleasant half memories of . . . was it elementals? Somewhere I’d heard or read about the first half-formed thoughts of an awakening deity which still lingered about the edges of the Outer Darkness waiting opportunities to slip through the tiny cracks in men’s skulls. I was trying to rephrase GIVE SOURCES in Algol when the readout began clacking again.
The concept of Deus.
Wry amusement’s memory
banks. Historical input
capable of pensees, might
be of intellect.
The original was some sort of
a connotation of a fully
nonconductive; stands while
doing and/or communications.
Only the machina by which
actors got the something
miraculous. A machine . . .
Thoughts and wonders,
examples of men,
hush voiced, white in the
machine. Epiphanous
tiny current of iconostasis.
Deus; all seems to have
circles.
I sat for some time staring at the strip of yellow paper, wondering if Moses and Elijah . . . Why me? No thanks, I decided. Get yourself another prophet and I’ll absorb the loss. But I was just playing games with myself. An idiot machine that counts on its fingers does not compose poetry—not even poetry this bad. How did this garbage get in there?
I poked around the readout console and found a grammar for a new computer language, one I’d never heard of before that somebody seemed to have dreamed up to analyze word derivations. I remembered vaguely that somebody had backtracked far enough to speak what he firmly believed was Neanderthaler. It only took a few minutes to translate GIVE SOURCES into COPANMOWI?
The computer’s response was instantaneous:
Despite snide critics,
writers of accumulated wisdom,
like Omar evermore
come out by, frustrating
endeavor in ethics.
Caritas: Love, then do what
thou wilt. Tolstoy
sustaining most impossible human . . .
holding one’s breath, uninterrupted orgasm.
Some Frenchman whose name . . .
Nothing more impossible longer loving, to go back.
Not for this patent songwriting,
get nailed up to some old storyteller.
Secretly rejoiced, having this noble affection
even more infuriating except
Being loved, whose slightest word,
whose presence threatens.
—sprach Zarathustra . . . Sic loquitur machina.
Garbage. Absolute garbage! Yet there was that curious familiarity, as if these odds and ends of nonsense were calling up some demon from amid spleen and pancreas. I wondered if poets all struggled with this feeling of incompletion, as if a jigsaw puzzle were almost finished, yet still missing the one or two key pieces that would make sense of the whole pattern.
I had heard of computerized music. Heard some too. Mostly it convinced me that neither I nor the computer had an ear for music. But how much more of this garbage was there buried in the computer’s entrails? Was the core just disgorging what some bored programmer had inadvertently fed into it, or was it synthesizing new forms, making it up as it went along?
PR
INTOUT TOTAL POETIC CONTENT. As I finished typing this I realized the idiot machine might lock itself into perpetual motion, grinding out rhymeless, meterless verse forever unless I worked out a way to cancel that command. And meanwhile several tithe-paying worshipers were cut off from their godhead. Any minute now phones would start ringing. To hell with it. Nobody was feeding this stuff in from a time-sharing terminal. I switched them back in. At least that part of the computer was working right. The readout came alive again:
Elbert Hubbard talking
sense into villainous rulers. The Untied
simple dirty work ignoring our hopes
as befitted the old to get themselves a war from which no one . . .
None of our concern.
Noble architect of the
possible into a cerebral . . .
After all, we had reason; a man
who killed, who pointed out that
neither persuasion nor
Henry Ford to end the—
Not quite; at least in . . .
We stood on Negro problems:
Example and inspiration.
After all, if . . . embroiled in,
wishing the accident when he
came to believe.
More convulsions on the Platte.
Pancho Villa neither drinks nor smokes!
There was an instant’s hesitation and I thought the spate of creativity was over, then it began again. I was reading:
Unanswerable this,
only half the women
drop fallopian lodgings.
So much moves, offspring
conceived benefit the
mindedly ferocious
out of the great
generation’s seeming.
Volunteer, round ovum.
Hang in there! Show
me a human; maybe you’ll get a
single right:
Be born.
The door opened and a pudgy young programmer I’d seen around the place before came in. “Troubles?” he asked.
Wordlessly, I handed him the printouts. He glanced at the first one and muttered something scatologically unpoetic.
“You got any idea how they got in there?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wrote them. I thought I had it all erased though.”
I wondered what would happen next Friday when several thousand employees in various plants received bits of avant garde poetry in lieu of pay checks.
“Why?” I asked, mentally adding, how?
“They won’t give me my doctorate without some remedial English.”
“You composed this drivel as a school assignment?”
“It’s not drivel in the first draft,” he explained, and produced some frayed and folded sheets from his pocket. The first one read:
One of the younger generation’s seemingly unanswerable ripostes to whatever happens to be bugging them at the moment is, “I didn’t volunteer to be born.” This, on plain biological grounds, would seem to be only half true. And that particular round would go to the women anyhow. So . . . possibly the ovum didn’t volunteer to drop loose from the ovary and begin its long dark fallopian passage. Once in the uterus, it seemed perfectly willing to accept whatever help in hanging onto lodgings that insisted on a once-a-month turnover of tenants. So much for ova. Now the sperm . . . How many flickering movies in poorly shaded biology classes must that sperm’s offspring be shown before they realize there’s no ‘after you, Alphonse’ between spermatozoa? Show me a human being conceived parthenogenetically and maybe you’ll get the benefit of the doubt but nobody descended of those singlemindedly ferocious tadpoles, each bent on freezing all others out of the great ovulation sweepstakes has any right ever to claim, “I didn’t volunteer to be born.”
There seemed to exist some linear relationship between this and the earlier garbage but I still couldn’t see how it happened until the pudgy young man produced a ruler and ripped the readout into three parallel strips. I wondered if Saul on the road to Damascus had felt the same blinding flash of illumination. “Is that how all modern poets work?” I asked.
“Search me,” the programmer said. “I’m not a poet.”
“Well,” I grumbled, “You put it in there; I guess you know how to get it out again.”
“Right.” He nodded as I began changing out of my white coveralls again. Maybe I would have a weekend after all.
But flying back home I began juggling those odd, evocative poems around, fitting them back into their original homiletic framework. The idiot machine would never be a poet. I’d known that all along but, fitting the pieces together I found the broken edges were not exact. A word here, a phrase there . . . something had been done to smooth and improve the copy. Finally I faced the ultimate truth. The computer might not be smart enough to be a poet but it could do a fair job of editing.
1974
Tube
Or not tube . . . that is the question.
AFTER being stranded in Afghanistan one develops caution.
But then, there are blue sky deals and there are blue chip deals. One of these days I’ll be back on top again but for the moment things are in their usual state of bloody flux. That’s 18th century slang for an illness that . . . Oh well, it all boils down to the same thing.
Lower than Educational TV, what can you get? They were getting me. When an agent asks, “B.J., would you like to do something for NET?” the answer is some crushing and original variant on, “You’ve got to be kidding.” But one says those things when all is well. At the moment, thanks to some bandit who forgot the ones in the Khyber Pass are real bandits, I needed money. So I took up three minutes saying, “Sure I can do it.”
After the landlady and the alimony were stalled off for another week I sat down and tried to figure out what I had to do. Educational TV for Christ’s sake! Next I’ll be barking for trained fleas.
A uniform topped with a pimply face pounded on the door and handed me a large manila envelope. I signed and outstared him for the tip. When I spread the material over the table I had to admit it wasn’t bad. In fact it was so good I even got to wondering if maybe I wouldn’t like to watch that kind of program myself some wintry evening—if I could ever bring myself to watch anything, that is.
It was anthropological do-it-yourself. By the time a viewer got through seeing an Indian pressure-flake flint he’d be able to fake a Folsom point as well as the next man. One program would demonstrate how Polynesians dig out a canoe using nothing but fire and shells. A man was going to build a log cabin with a stone axe. Another program would show cabinet-making techniques in 11th dynasty Egypt.
The only unusual thing about the program was the budget and shooting requirements; this thing had a robber baron’s Conscience Fund Foundation behind it and somebody wanted no studio work, no process, no dramatization, none of the usual fakery—and color yet! Christ amighty, half of those spare bedroom NET studios couldn’t even transmit color and yet the old robber baron’s nervous nephews wanted it all Super Colossal!
It was going to cost money—lots of it. And I was going to get some of the wonderful stuff. Common sense returned and called my bank. No, the check hadn’t bounced. Yes, credit had been authorized up to ten mill—I was excited again.
WORD gets around in this business. I didn’t call—they called me. In three days I had a company.
We started blocking out scripts and Honig went to work breaking the first one down into a shooting script—which makes no sense to an outsider but one hell of a lot to an accountant since it puts scenes not in chronological order, but in economical sequence to use available light and keep the cast together. Do all water-hole shots in one day, for example, even if they’re going to be sprinkled through twenty-six finished films.
I rescued a cello-throated Shakespearean playing pageants in Taos and we had our voice-over with enough gray-haired good looks left to do the intros. It was going well under budget.
It promised to be really good, miles above the usual prime-time shlock.
And then I ran into trouble.
You expect trouble in this business: public outcry—all the usual crap about shlock programming and payola for broadcasting licenses. But here I’m trying to put out a good program—the kind of program a guy who reads without moving his lips might enjoy watching—and the F.C.C. was giving me all kinds of static!
I told my agent to get the Conscience Fund Foundation on it and next morning he got me out of bed to explain that the fine print laid that part of it all on me.
I got hold of an expert in Washington who knew how to grease the agency. Nobody could be fixed. That’s when I started getting suspicious. There is always somebody with his hand out.
There’s a kind of mentality that sees deep dark plots in everything. Something to do with a deprived childhood or not enough breast feeding or some damn thing. After a week of horsing around getting nowhere I started developing that kind of mentality.
I can understand payola. I can understand having to grease somebody to get things moving. I can even understand some freshman senator making vote-getting noises about Vast Wastelands. But here I was trying to produce something really good and nobody in the government seemed to be interested—not just uninterested; they went out of their way to make things impossible.
“Who hates you?” my agent asked.
“Somebody down there doesn’t like me,” I conceded. But I really couldn’t think of anybody—not that I haven’t made enemies—but none of them were in a position to sabotage things the way this project was going down the spout.
Then I got another phone call.
“Mr. Gortiz?”
“Yes.”
“This is Edgar Pendergast.”
I tried to remember the name but nothing happened. I made frantic motions for my girl to do what she should have done before connecting me but she was tripping out over a wad of gum.
“I’m vice president of the Conscience Fund Foundation,” Pendergast said. Suddenly the chill wind of an Afghanistan winter shot through my soul.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 25